The Grey Shadow

I am about to redesign a 6-page long survey form for our church, and this is just about the beginning.

About a month ago, our senior pastor unexpectedly passed away, and this put in motion a series of events that still has me moving. Our church is planning an administrative session on Sunday to decide on the installation of a Pastoral Council to oversee matters of our church while a pastoral search is conducted. I had to prepare a lot of materials for that session.

Furthermore, a general consultation is planned for Sept. 9. In that occassion, a number of forms will be used to survey what the Church is thinking on several issues. I designed the form through several iterations and I am still incorporating changes to it. Additionally, I am retyping the Articles of Incorporation of our Church from some illegible notarized copy, and I have to be as accurate and exacting as humanly possible.

In sum: boring, tedious, repetitive, but important, work. I’ll be glad when it is over.

When I had to sit for the qualification exams for my Public Translator certification, I had to face what I would call “a translator’s worst nightmare.” You must translate some text in your native language to your second language, and the text is absolute garbage.

The language problem. Most translators in the world would turn down a job that would require them to translate from their native language to their second language. Standard translating practice calls for a translator to have his target language as his native one. However, in some countries (such as mine) this is not an option; if you are a translator, you must perform translation in both ways. In that case, translating into your second language as target is an exceedingly hard task. One must be extra careful and there are pitfalls by the dozen.

Garbage text. This is one of the worst possible situations for a translator to be in: Translating a text that is absolute garbage. Imagine an awfully written piece of text with ambiguities, inconsistencies, syntax errors, missspellings, and so on…. and then, imagine translating that! This poses a dilemma with two horns.

The first horn is to translate the source text as faithfully as possible. This might seem advisable, but there is this problem: garbage in means garbage out. A poorly written text, full of inconsistencies and mistakes, will generate a target text of equally poor quality. That would seem fair; but the problem is, that the text will carry the badge of “translated by Eduardo”. The consequence is that a lot of people will have a very poor text as the only sample of your work. So, plainly speaking: translating faithfully such pieces of text comes very close to professional suicide.

The other horn would be to avoid this problem by simultaneously “correcting” the text while translating. You lose in literalness, but you gain in coherence and in textual quality and the result is something you wouldn’t be so ashamed of showing off. The problem is that this is also undesirable; because the gains in textual quality and coherence are losses in fidelity. And the commissioner of the translation (or client) could certainly object to that.

For me, this is an unresolved dilemma. I even faced it in my Public Translation exam: I had to translate some really poor Spanish source text into English. I managed to do so after suffering a lot. After the exam, when the examination board called me to notify my passing of the exam, I told the examiners about how lousy grammar the source texts had. And one examiner said to me: “That’s precisely our point. These kinds of texts are the ones you will most probably get in your professional practice.”

“Okay, ma’am, but tell me how should I translate: Should I be faithful or should I correct the texts?”

“That wouldn’t be a problem for you. You did fine.”

Someone please give me an explanation!

We had a rather cold day today, with temperatures of 15 C (58-60 F) on the air. This might not seem cold; but we also had rain, mists, and a polar southern wind blowing continuously. I went to church to the 8am service, and it was rather well, save for the fact that our worship director got carried away and she handed the service to our preacher 20 minutes later. The sermon was very good for our situation, and the preacher spoke effectively and graciously held our attention for a little more than 30 minutes.

After that, we went to our father’s place. Mom went on a trip to San Pedro (a remote town some 200 km NE of Asunción, where we live). There she went to visit some relatives with my sister Cristina and some my mom’s brothers. Dad was here, resting in his bedroom as usual. An hour later, my sister Elena and my two lovely nieces, Paula and Sofia, joined us for Sunday dinner. We had some delicious spaghetti with beef stew (pasta is almost a tradition as a Sunday dish; the only thing that could compete for that place is barbecued meat). After enjoying our meal, with some exquisite Argentine red wine, Dad produced some chocolates, to our nieces’ great delight. It was an enjoyable occasion.

I still have lots of things to do. I have a severely difficult translation in the queue, and my office work is becoming increasingly overwhelming. I still have the two writing projects that I mentioned earlier ongoing, and I also hope to continue some of my earlier series (On Porn, On the Interpretation of Ecclesiastes). Please pray for good time management, patience, and creativity. Have a nice Sunday!

This has been a challenging week. Things are not going as well as I would have wished in the financial front; but we are holding on. But the most difficult problem is a delicate situation that must be overcome by my local church. Our senior pastor unexpectedly passed away last week, and the outlook for our congregation is delicate because of circumstances I would not like to comment right now.

On other news, I finally managed to upgrade all my WordPress sites to version 2.2.2. The upgrade was simple, and the good WordPress folks reduced the steps in the upgrade process from five to three. So far, it’s good.

Please keep praying for my local church, my family, and this writer. That will be greatly appreciated.

Paraguayans think that if you make it past August, chances are good that you will survive for one more year. Old maids say that this month is especially hard on little children and senior folks; and in a sense, they are right: The National Directorate of Statistics, Surveys and Censuses (is the plural form correct?) states that August is the month with the highest mortality rate.

Reasons for that are not hard to discover. August is the last month of winter, and in that month one is pushing at the limits of his metabolic reserves and environmental stress endurance. To complicate matters further, August is not a typical “winter” month. While it could be cold and downright chilly, there is the dreaded August drought, where you can reach highs of 38 C (100 F). The heat is dry and oppressive; clothing feels as if the were freshly ironed, all day; and the sky is brazen with dust particles.

Therefore, it is understandable that Paraguayans have made a point to have some traditional meals on August 1st to help them “overcome” this difficult month. They go from practical to silly, and paint some of the typical Paraguayan character. Let’s see them:

1. “Carrulín”. The strongest tradition prescribes the preparation and drinking of a very peculiar beverage on the First Day of August. It is called carrulín from its ingredients: sugar cane liquor (caña), rue (ruda), and lemon (limón). The beverage is made by picking rue (in this country, this denotes several plants of the Rutaceae family, preferably of the Ruta genus) and lemons, and crush them up in caña, which is a distilled beverage made from pure sugar cane. Caña is a typical liquor from Paraguay and people who know swear that it’s way, way better than rum.

   Carrulín is said to provide protection from colds, influenza, and other respiratory diseases that are common in August. Besides drinking it on the First of August, Paraguayans also drink it when they are affected by any cold or flu in August. And the beverage might very well be effective: add the vitamin C of lemon with several active principles of rue and lemon extracted by using the liquor as a solvent, and you could have a very good medicinal value.

2. Agosto Poty. I’ve already talked about the favorite beverage of Paraguayans (myself included), tereré. Well, this particular tradition prescribes that you must put in your mate or tereré some crushed leaves, stems, and flowers of the plant known as Agosto Poty (“the flower of August”, here denoting several groundsels or ragworts of the Senecio genus).

   It is widely believed that this plant could help overcome the ills of August; but the facts differ. Ragworts are highly toxic because they contain pyrrolizidine alkaloids, probably as a way to discourage feeding by herbivores by providing a bitter taste. Pyrrolizidine alkaloids are metabolized into several highly toxic pyrrol derivatives in the liver, thus causing serious liver toxicity (summarized info, very long info). Doctors know that it’s hard to swim against traditions, so they just recommend to go easy on the ragworts, and not to use them in days other than August 1st. Silly, isn’t it?

3. Jopará. This is a strong, heavy stew made with beans, hard kernel corn, meat, cottage cheese, and vegetables. As I said before, this is mostly eaten on the First Day of October, but it is also present on Paraguayan tables on the First of August. Whatever the tradition might be or not, this is incredibly delicious and definitely a help against the ills of the month.

If you ever stop by my place, I will be happy to offer you a non-alcoholic version of “Carrulín” (perhaps in a herbal tea version) any day. Ready to sip a little…?